


Beyond the Sea Somewhere

by Lizardlicks



Series: Romancing the Sea [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, F/F, F/M, Humanstuck, M/M, Minor Injuries, Multi, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Seatrolls as Merfolk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-09
Updated: 2018-07-09
Packaged: 2019-06-07 13:15:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15219947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lizardlicks/pseuds/Lizardlicks
Summary: "There was a bump.  Something hit the boat; you remember AA shouting your name.  You remember your fingers slipping on the spray-slick railing as you desperately snatched for anything at all to stop your fall.  You remember the rocks..."





	Beyond the Sea Somewhere

**Author's Note:**

  * For [liasangria](https://archiveofourown.org/users/liasangria/gifts).



> Polyswap 2018 fill, prompt was: "human! sollux and aradia. merpeople! eridan and feferi (but they look like canon trolls and not traditional mermaids, maybe?)" I hope this satisfies!
> 
> Extra thanks to [ The_Shame_Basement](https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Shame_Basement) for help with beta'ing and edits!

It’s dark, but you don’t know if that’s the reason you’re having trouble getting your eyes to focus through the haze of pain.  Wherever you laid down has got to be the most fucking uncomfortable spot you’ve ever had the misfortune to collapse in, and that’s counting a hospital waiting room chair.  You don’t remember laying down. You’re having trouble remember much of anything that happened after breakfast actually, it’s all scrambled. AA talked about going out on the boat this afternoon and you wanted to go with her.  For once, the quiet of your rented home was starting to get to you with her gone such long hours. Getting out onto the water sounded like a nice change of pace, and your various ailments didn’t seem to be in disagreement this time.

This must be punishment for your hubris.  Front and left is a weird place for your migraine to be centered, but you’re used to your biology deciding to switch up it’s usual misery for fresh, funky fuckery every now and again.  Could always be a tumor of course. That would be your luck; get whisked away to a weeks-long beach vacation by your super hot girlfriend on a pristine and very remote island, only to find out you have cancer.  Yup, sounds like a Sollux Captor thing.

Speaking of your super hot girlfriend, the voices hissing at each other in half restrained anger a few feet away aren’t helping your headache any.  You don’t know what it is she’s watching, but it sounds tense, and you’ve clearly overdone something already, the stress isn’t helping. “Hey, AA, could you turn the volume down?”

The voices abruptly cut off.  You breathe a sigh of guilty relief; you didn’t mean for her to stop watching her thing.  Maybe she plugged in her earbu--

“It’s _awake_ !” One of the voices snarls, loud and low, in a frequency that hits your monkey brain in its gut with a shriek of _predator_!

You sit bolt upright and immediately regret it as a new starburst of pain explodes behind your eye.  You are not on the floor of your cozy two bedroom rental, or stashed down below deck of AA and TV’s research boat.  You’re sopping wet from head to sneakers, and the floor under you is cold. It’s dark because there is no blessed artificial lighting; in fact the only light source anywhere is the flickering pulses of pink and purple dots that outline two humanoid forms in front of you.

There was a bump.  Something hit the boat; you remember AA shouting your name.  You remember your fingers slipping on the spray-slick railing as you desperately snatched for anything at all to stop your fall.  You remember the rocks...

The things staring you down could pass for human. If it was midnight, under a new moon.  And everyone was blind folded. They’re all angled points, and glisten like they’re perpetually wet.  The purple one is growling. It’s hard to see through your tears, but you try to track it as it stalks a few steps to one side, then the other.  Very slowly, so as not to startle the clearly agitated... _whatever_ it is, you lift your hand a probe the spot that hurts the most with your finger tips.  You’re surprised to find there is no gaping flap of skin. Hardly even a goose egg. As you keep feeling, you encounter a line of tender skin, raised but otherwise whole.

“I healed you,” the pink one explains without your prompting.

“Don’t talk to it!” purple dude snaps. You think it might be a guy now that you’ve heard them both speak, but their voices are weird and wavering. “Tell us what you want an’ we may allow you to continue breathin’, dirtlicker.”

He’s obviously directing that last bit at you.  This is stupid. What you want is to wake up from this crazy-ass nightmare you’ve somehow found yourself trapped in.  “I don’t want anything. If you let me go right now I won’t even call the cops, I swear.”

“LIES!”  His shout is accompanied by a brighter flash of violet.  You flinch back as it provokes another throb of pain. “Your vessel’s been circlin’ our temple for days.  We’ve felt your fake song in our bones, we know you’re searchin’ for somethin’!”

“Fake... song?”

He growls, a long, low sound that drags out until it’s bouncing off the walls and you can feel the vibrations in your spine--

“Oh. Fuck, the sonar?  Yeah, we’re trying to map the extent of the structures underwater.”

His rattling cuts out. “Why?”  

“Are you serious?  Did you miss the big, yellow construction equipment trying to mow over centuries-isolated beachfront for a tourist resort a few weeks ago?”  You really don’t want to explain the whole situation, the politics make your head spin on a normal, concussion-free day. You’re not even technically a part of the research team, you just tagged along with AA because you had the PTO from your regular job, and she was going to be flying out to some remote tropical island for two months, and, well.  You don’t do well left to your own devices for that long. You figured you could help each other anyway; you have a new data compiler, and she’s going to have a metric fuckton of numbers that need crunching.

“So you’re tryin’ to plunder our sacred temple, then...” he hisses, and oh, god no fuck, that’s not what you meant at all.

“No, look.  Some rich asshole made a deal with some government asshole so he could build a big asshole resort for more assholes, but no one okayed that with the locals.  We’re here to _keep_ them from ‘plundering your temple’.  We’re the red tape, get it?”

“You’re trying to protect this place.”  The pink one finally speaks up again.

You nod slowly, careful not to jostle your already abused skull.  “Yeah. Legally? No one can do any building that would disrupt sites of cultural or historical significance.  The ruins off the shore aren’t just under the water, they go back into the island underground. If we figure out how far, this whole area could potentially be restricted. Maybe even the island itself.”

“Eridan.” She snatches her companion’s hand and halts his pacing.  “I believe him. We need to let him go.”

“I don’t like this, Fef.”  He leans in to rest his head against hers.  “We can’t trust any a them monkeys. This place ain’t safe anymore.  You let this one go an’ we won’t be safe anywhere.”

A stab of despair twists under your sternum.  You don’t know where you are. You can’t run. You don’t even know if AA could find you.  What would she think? What would happen if she couldn’t even recover your body?

“He’s with the Nitram boy, right?  If their family trusts him and his mate, maybe we can too.”

“Please, I swear to Cthulhu or whatever the fuck.” You don’t usually plead, but god, you don’t even know where you are, you’re completely at their mercy.  “I don’t have any beef with you, please, just let me go.” You press the heels of your palms to your eyes, unable to blame their watering on your headache anymore.  It’s deathly silent for far too many moments; you wonder if they’ve abandoned you to starve and rot slowly instead of finishing you off quick, but you’re too chicken shit to bring yourself to look.  Then there’s the scrape of footsteps drawing near. Cold, damp fingers close over your wrists and tug your hands away from your eyes.

This close, the girl’s shimmering fuschia spots are almost blinding.  You can see them flicker in inscrutable patterns with the rhythm of her breathing, rippling over her face, highlighting the peaks and casting the valleys in deeper shadow.  Her eyes are pitch black, reflecting your face lit in faerie fire back at you. You are struck quite suddenly with the thought that she’s gorgeous, in a way that is completely alien and terrifying.  Like the void of space, or the crushing cold of an ocean trench.

“What’s your name?”

“Sollux.  Captor.” _Thollcth._ You hate the way your tongue catches whenever you’re too tired to wrangle it.  

“Sollux Captor,” she repeats, enunciation perfect despite your botched delivery, then smiles.  She has teeth like broken glass. “I’m Feferi Peixes. As the last heiress of the Peixes family, I hear by invoke the right of my spawning to bring you into our service.”

The purple dude behind her does a full body twitch.  “Fef, angels’ sakes, we only just met this dumb monkey, you can’t--”

“Do you question your _heiress_ , Eridan?”  She keeps smiling cheerfully toward you, but her tone just dropped to chilly at best.  ‘Eridan’ wilts.

“No, a course not.”

“Well then!  Sollux,” you turn your attention back to her, “despite sounding very pretentious and silly, I am charging you with a gravely important duty.  The humans of this island used to send to our people those cunning and kind among them who would serve us. It has been many spawnings since we last returned to our ancestral grounds, and the old ways have almost died out of memory, but some still keep them.  I believe you when you say you came here to protect this place. I’m asking you to protect us as well. If we lose these temples, the last of our safe spawning grounds go too, and our bloodlines will be doomed.”

Spawning grounds, oh shit!  They showed up to make babies and found someone messing with the honeymoon suite.  No wonder purple guy is so pissed off.

“I’m just the tech guy.  I don’t know that there’s much I can do, but whatever it is, I promise I’ll do it.”  You mean it. They’re terrifying and beautiful, and you hate the thought of their whole species dying with them.  You’re plenty resigned to death. Just not here, not now. Not for you, or them.

“That’s all that we ask.  And please, keep our presence here a secret, except with those who can be trusted, and only if it will further your undertaking.”

“Yes.  Yeah, of course.”  You have so, so many questions.  Is she some kind of mermaid princess?  Is this a lifelong station? Are you going to spend the rest of your foreseeable future on one of TV’s boats doing whale rescues or some shit?  Do you get any perks, like super powers? Feferi doesn’t give you time to ask any of them, though. She grins and pulls you into an almost crushing hug.  And then she-- oh, hey, hello. That’s a _very_ friendly kiss she’s planting on your mouth.  She licks against your lips coaxing them open.  You can feel the points of her teeth, the cold of her body making you feel weak and floppy.  

Your tongue tingles, and then the sensation moves to your teeth, gums, and alarmingly down your throat.  You push Feferi away in time to turn your head and cough, then cough again, but it doesn't stop, and you end end up drooling and gasping as pins-and-needles static reaches down into your chest.

"Ah, sorry," she says, head tilting, "most humans don't react that strongly to a little breathing spell."

"I bet-- most humans you've encountered-- don't have asthma," you wheeze.  Oh god, you hope you don't start a reaction here, you're pretty sure your emergency inhaler is still on the boat.  You try to keep your breathing even and steady, focus on a normal pattern while trying to resist sucking in the big gasps your body's instinctive reaction to needing oxygen wants you to do. The static turns cold, like you just sucked in pure menthol.  It burns for about five seconds, then, surprisingly, subsides. The chill is still there, but there’s no threatening spasm in your diaphragm.

"Better?"  Feferi asks.  And… actually, you're feeling more than better, now that the initial reaction is subsiding.  The tightness in your chest that's been slowly building is gone. You take a deep breath. Then another.  Bullet fucking dodged, score one positive thing for today.

"I think I'm good."

She's smiling again.  "Good. You should be able to breathe normally, even when we pass through the flooded ways.  It will be the fastest route to the surface."

"What, fuck, you mean I can _breathe water_?"

"As long as the spell lasts.  You should have plenty of time to return to your mate."  She takes your hands and stands, helping you up with her.  "Come, I'll lead the way."

"Let me take him, Fef.  Can't complete the cleansin' a the hatchin' chambers without your sorcerin' anyhow."  Purple guy, Eridan, finally pipes up again after FF shut him down the first time. You don't miss the way he's only glancing at you side long, or how his colors have dimmed to slow pulsing.  He's still not happy, that's pretty clear. You want to argue; you don't trust this guy as far as you could kick him. But that doesn't seem to be the case for FF, because she lets go of your hand and steps back so he can take her place.  He grabs your wrist and tugs.

"C'mon, dirtlicker, let's get this over with"

"I'm pretty sure 'dirtlicker' is offensive," you needle him.  You really shouldn't be antagonizing the scary fishman, but he’s been a douche the whole ten minutes you’ve known him.  The way his shoulders hunch defensively and Feferi giggles pretty much confirms that he's been throwing merperson equivalent of slurs at you and expecting not to get called on it.  "Just Sollux works, thanks."

"Whatever.  Hurry up before Fef's enchantment wears off."

Another, harder tug almost pulls you off your feet.  Eridan doesn’t seem interested in letting you get your bearings, and you have you do an awkward hop-flail combo to keep from falling face first.  You aren’t sure he would stop even if you did.

You follow reluctantly, but with little other choice.  Feferi waves you off happily when you glance back over your shoulder at her. As her glow fades behind you, Eridan’s dim purple illumination is all you can see by, and you realize you _really_ can’t see much.  You can feel the floor under your feet, and looking down only reveals grey stone tile.  There’s patterns on them, dark lines that make unpleasant shapes your mind shies away from, but he doesn’t let you slow down long enough to see anything distinct.  You aren’t sure that you’d want to. Around you is total darkness like nothing you’ve ever experienced in all of your wired-in life. The air is damp, chill, and your footsteps echo back at you through rooms and corridors you can’t see until the primordial rodent part of your brain is convinced there are hundreds of things stomping and clawing behind you, around you.  

It’s only when Eridan stops abruptly and you slam face-first into his back that you realize you’ve been unconsciously huddling closer to him.

“Hey, watch it dir- landdweller!  Pay attention.”

“To what?” you mutter, but he doesn’t acknowledge you if he heard it.  He just stands there, feathery little fin things on the side of face twitching slightly before he picks a new direction and starts hauling you along again.

“This way,” he says belatedly, as if you didn’t already figure that out.

After an impossible length of time and a few more turns you couldn’t possibly hope to keep track of, the walls start closing in.  Not that they’re actually moving, or at least you hope not. But your footsteps no longer bounce and echo the way they did in the open chambers.  The quiet is somehow worse than the noise before. You aren’t usually claustrophobic, but right now the only thing keeping a mounting sense of being trapped here forever from kicking your ass and setting off another asthma attack is the cool tingling that’s settled somewhere between your ribs.  You focus on your breathing, counting up to ten then back down again.

Another turn, and you find yourself in a hall narrow enough that Eridan’s glow weakly illuminates the walls.  It’s lined with pictographs of the same vague, dark shapes as the floor tiles. Some of them look almost recognizable.  A whale here, over there a shark. Humans and fish people standing ridgid or bent in esoteric poses that you don’t have the context to understand.  But there’s other things too, shapes that make your stomach twist and bring the headache back ringing in your ears...

You swallow, and fix your gaze straight ahead on Eridan’s back.  “Hey, how much further do we have to go?”

You’re a little pleased by him startling at your voice.  His fins flick back toward you then forward again. “Not far.”

Well that was helpful.  “Are we underground? How far back does this structure go?”  

“I ain’t stupid, landdweller, you won’t trick me into divulgin’ our secrets.”

Ooookay, he is going to be negative amounts of helpful, then.  You huff. “I’m not trying to trick you. I meant what I said. The more we know about this place, the easier it will be to fight to preserve it.  That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

“What I want!”  He slams to a stop again, and you only barely catch yourself from running into him this time.  But then he’s turning on you, snarling, and you have a very uncomfortably close view of his murder teeth.  “What I want is to keep me, an’ Fef, an’ our lineage safe! What I _want_ is to protect my people like my ancestors before me did, but I _can’t_ !  I can’t help _anyone_ , and I’m gonna... I’m goin’ to lose them.”

He chokes off, panting, closed fist trembling, and the clawed tips of the fingers around your wrist dig into meat.  Your flesh.

“Holy shit, dude.”  You can’t look away from his eyes, his pained, almost panicked expression sinking hooks into your chest.

“I’m gonna lose everythin’ important to me,” he says, so much more softly, “but horrors be fucked if I’ll let them go without a fight.”

“That’s not going to happen.”  He blinks at you, clear membrane moving half a second slower than his eyelids.  “Because you’re not fighting alone, and I’m not going to let some stupid corporate suit halfway across the world bulldoze your home for a Havana bar.”

“Even if you mean it, how do I know you ain’t just gonna go be stupid and get us all killed anyway?”

“My own body has been trying to kill me since I was six, and it hasn’t succeeded yet.”

He keeps staring, and you meet his challenge with your own gaze, refusing to look away.  Finally, he snorts and lowers his fins. “You have some guts for a landdweller.”

“That’s just life.”  You shrug with one shoulder, finally ceding your staredown.  You don’t think on that stuff much anymore. At least not any further than you have to.  Fucked up is normal, and normal is a fever dream you couldn’t remember if you tried. You know you’re going to be paying this day forward in some very unpleasant ways for the next week or so, but there’s nothing to be done about it until you’re home.

Eridan’s face does a thing like it wants to smile, but he’s too stubborn to let it.  At least he’s relaxed enough to stop crushing your wrist in a deathgrip. He smooths his thumb over the little pricks of blood he drew with his claws, almost apologetic.  “We aren’t far. This hall leads to the outside, but we have to pass through a flooded portion first.”

“Which is what the breathing spell is for?” you ask.

“Mm.”  He nods.  “An’ then a swim to the surface.  You’ll end up not far from where you fell in if your friends are still lookin’ for you.”  That’s at least mildly comforting.

“Okay, let’s go then.”

He leads you this time.  You’re still moving at a brisk clip, but he isn’t dragging you.  Before long, the air grows wetter. There’s droplets clinging to the walls and your hair.  They plip-plop occasionally on the floor and disappear into the cracks between the tiles. Eridan brings you up short one more time, then looks back at you.

“Ready?”  There’s a dark, still line of water a few feet ahead.  It seems more like a hole in reality, some place where the earth falls away and ceases to exist.

“Nope.” You laugh, and move forward anyway.

The water is cold.  It hits your already waterlogged shoes and soaks right through.  Of course, you don’t submerge right away. You can’t even feel the slope in the floor, so it’s several long minutes before the water has climbed to your ankles.  Then your knees. Your waist, and armpits. At this point Eridan looks to you again and says, “faster to swim from here. Just breathe normal.”

“Right,” you squeak through chattering teeth, “breathe normal.  In _water_.”

Eridan lets go of your hand and disappears under the surface in a movement so smooth it barely leaves a ripple.  For a few brief seconds your dread-stricken brain is convinced he’s just gone, but then you feel something brush against your legs.  Then again. Asshole is swimming literal circles around you. His head pops up again and he blows annoyed bubbles through his nose.

“C’mon, Fef’s enchantment ain’t permanent.”  
  
“Okay, I get it.  I’m on a timer.” You take a deep breath through your nose and let it out slow, bracing.  Then you dive. When you open your eyes, Eridan is still swimming in lazy loops. From here his movements are hypnotic, accented by his ghostlight glow.  All the little bits of webbing lining his edges are flared out against the water, delicate and gossamer. You’re so transfixed you actually forget to think about breathing at all.

He gets impatient with your staring and grabs the front of your shirt in his fist.  You’d protest, but as it turns out, breathing water doesn’t make speaking through it any easier, and it’s actually faster for him to pull you along now that he’s in his element.  You do get him to stop yanking on your shirt, and with a little pantomiming, he lets you put your arms around his shoulders instead. This puts you in prime position to study the photophores along his neck and the fins lining his head and jaw.  You quash the errant urge to test either with nibbling.

Free of gravity, of anything but your own weight made negligible by the water, Eridan flies.  The paintings along the walls whip by you so fast they almost seem to move of their own accord, undulating like waves.  Slowly, they fade, whatever pigment used to paint them dissolved by the ocean and time. At first you don’t notice any change in light or pressure, but before long you can see a narrow shaft of sunlight ahead of you.  It’s filtering down through an opening in the ceiling. Eridan swims through it, then up, and up, and finally through a crevice in the rocks surrounding the island, and you are for the first time in what felt like an entire eternity bathed in golden sunset glow.

He takes you to the surface, and circles the peaks of the rocks that poke above the water line while you cough up water and try to get your bearings.

“Sol.  I gotta go.  I can’t take you to shore, there’s too many eyes.”

“I can catch a boat.”  You squint across the glare of the water.  “I hope.”

“Here,” he says, then pulls your bruising wrist in front of his face, and loops a bit a cord around it.  It’s strung with a couple small shells, and something too long and narrow to be a shark’s tooth. “If somethin’ goes wrong, and you need to speak to us, use this.  Crush the tooth. Swallow it anyway you prefer. It will only last a few minutes, but we’ll hear your words as if you were speakin’ to us.” You twist and turn your arm over, watching the tooth catch the sun on its point.

Eridan brings you a spot that looks like it stays dry at high tide, and you scramble to cling to it, limbs wobbly and uncertain.  When you get your feet steady enough to risk looking back, he’s gone. Left before you could so much as say goodbye.

As you sit in the fading sunlight and shiver through your soaked clothes, it’s almost easy to wonder if the whole thing wasn’t some hallucination brought on by the partial brain death of a drowning victim.  You keep staring at the cord and tooth, running your fingers over it until a passing fishing boat finally spots you and plucks you off the rocks. Hours later, when the ER doctor has cleared you from anything worse than a mild concussion and a touch of hypothermia and Aradia is crushing you into her chest in the back seat of Tavros’ old Caravan, you still can’t shake the shadows of dark beings lit in violet and fuchsia hovering in the back of your mind.


End file.
